Realdo Colombo

Realdo Colombo (unknown artist)

Matteo Realdo Colombo or Latinized Renaldus Columbus (* around 1516 in Cremona , † 1559 in Rome ) was an Italian anatomist and surgeon .

Life

Realdo Colombo was born in Cremona as the son of the pharmacist Antonio Colombo. Hardly anything has come down to us about the early years of his life; some of his birth year is also dated to around 1510. He completed an apprenticeship in Milan and probably practiced his father's profession for some time. Then he turned to surgery and studied with Giovanni Antonio Lonigo for seven years . In 1538 he enrolled to study surgery and anatomy at the University of Padua , where Andreas Vesal taught and he was soon considered an exceptionally good student of anatomy. As a student, he received teaching positions at the university. In 1542 he went to Venice briefly to assist Lonigo. However, he returned to Padua in 1543 and took over the post the following year Vesal, who had traveled to Switzerland to supervise the printing of his book De Humani Corporis Fabrica . Colombo stayed in Padua in this capacity for two years. Then he moved on the orders of Cosimo I in 1546 to Pisa . There he worked with Michelangelo . He intended to publish an illustrated anatomy work with Michelangelo to compete with Vesal. But that never happened, probably also because of Michelangelo's advanced age. In 1549, following a request from Pope Paul IV, Colombo took over a chair at the " Sapienza " in Rome , which he held until his death. In 1556 he autopsied the body of Ignatius of Loyola .

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Title copper engraving by Realdus Columbus: De re anatomica libri

Colombo published his own anatomical work, De Re Anatomica , in 1559, shortly before his death. Many of the discoveries described therein overlapped with those that Gabriele Fallopio had made at the same time, including those of the clitoris . Fallopio's book Observationes Anatomicae appeared two years later, but he claimed to have completed it before Colombo. One of the discoveries ascribed to Colombo is the pulmonary circulation , which enabled and in part anticipated William Harvey's groundbreaking concept of blood circulating in a circular manner in the body . In fact, the pulmonary circulation had already been described six years earlier by the Spanish anatomist Michael Servetus , but Colombo's discovery is regarded as an independent, separate achievement. Another important finding was that the heart is only actively contracting, previously the opposite view had been believed. Colombo's physiological observations of the action of the heart and the direction of blood flow were based on animal vivisections .

Colombo's reputation never reached such proportions during his lifetime as that of his competitors Vesal and Fallopio, with whom he often got into public disputes. The very bad relationship with Vesal since 1555 at the latest may have been due to the fact that Colombo had already proven several technical errors in his time in Padua. Fallopio in turn accused him of plagiarism even after his death.

Publications

• De Re Anatomica Libri XV. (Venice, 1559)

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• Heinz Schott (Ed.): Milestones in Medicine. Harenberg, Dortmund 1996. ISBN 3-611-00536-3 .
• Susanne Hahn: Colombo, Realdo. In: Werner E. Gerabek , Bernhard D. Haage, Gundolf Keil , Wolfgang Wegner (eds.): Enzyklopädie Medizingeschichte. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin and New York 2005, ISBN 3-11-015714-4 , p. 267 f.

Web links

Commons : Realdo Colombo  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica